Creative Writing as Research Practice: A Workshop

Writing is the beating heart of all research output. The stronger your writing, the better your chances of getting read. In this brief workshop, researchers will discuss the ways in which creative tools can be applied to their own writing, and they will participate in two creative writing exercises. The first of these will be focused on space or locating research within its own context. The second exercise will be focused on finding/building a narrative voice suited to the research.

Participants should bring their own preferred writing materials (notebooks or laptops). 

Annie Zaidi is a bilingual writer and her body of work that spans multiple genres including non-fiction, fiction, scripts, poetry and graphic storytelling. She won the international Nine Dots Prize (2019) for creative thinking that tackles contemporary societal issues, and the Tata Litlive prize for fiction for her novel, Prelude to a Riot (Aleph, 2019). Her published work includes Bread, Cement, Cactus: A memoir of belonging and dislocation (CUP 2020),  City of Incident (Aleph 2022), and a collection of essays, Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales. She is the editor of Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women's Writing (Aleph 2015), and has also directed a documentary film tracing the literary history of Indian women: In her words: The journey of Indian women. Other essays, stories and poems have appeared in several literary journals including Wasafiri, Massachusetts Review, Portside Review, The Aleph Review, Out of Print, and Griffith Review.

The event is free and open to all PhD students, ECR, and academics interested in modern and contemporary studies, broadly understood. Please feel free to share it in your networks.

For accessibility options, see Durham University guidelines. If you have any query on how to get there, please contact us here or on our X account @NorthModCont and feel free to write to us at nmcnetwork2024@gmail.com.